The perspective given by eighty-odd years of spy novels shows Ian Fleming to be a minor writer who, himself, did little to advance the form. Fleming possessed only meager talents as a maker of plots, and he fails absolutely when compared with the men who are popularly assumed to have been his teachers—Buchan and Sapper. He fails to render more than cartoon reality in his characters, either major or minor. With setting Fleming does do a bit better, as he needs to create settings to cover the lacunae in these other areas and to pad out his books in order to make them novels, and short novels at that. Finally, he has little to say in the way of theme: his conservatism is inarticulate and muzzy-headed when compared to, say, Buchan's or even Cheyney's. (p. 201)
More than anything, Fleming as a writer brings to mind [Graham Greene's] Our Man in Havana …, where an author's fantasies, sometimes innocent, sometimes playful, grow out of the writer's grasp and become reshaped by the world. Fleming's creations certainly live lives of their own and plenty of people believe in them, but Fleming himself was hard-pressed to continue creating them out of Edwardian materials, padding from his travels, and from half-serious, half-fake fragments from his own fantasy life.
